Brooklyn, Halloween, 10 p.m., walking up a stoop.
To me, stoops are for dropping ‘Gs, shootin’ the breeze, maybe shellin’ some peas and mmHm-spittin’ seeds, sunflower my favorite. And the ‘Bama public schools that stoop-spit me out watered me for parties with Bill and Jim and Matthew, not Elia or Sima, or “WkshyymJobysdf” is I’m pretty sure what he said, I think, sticking out my hand.
I hope it doesn’t show.
“Nice to meet you, WkshyymJobysdf,” I say, already up the stoop and inside, and I hope I slur the name. (Better they think drunk than dumb.) “I’m Bri,” I say with a big, Southern smile. Then I ever-so-quickly flick my eyes to the side, wickedly half-cock my most dangerous grin along the way and lock my pupils sickly with his on the way back, murmuring, “Or…Harley Quinn.”
Devilishly is how I imagine I pulled it off.
Devil-may-care, I feel so cool, though, like I’m constantly, drug-lessly high. And my criminally insane comic book character Harley Quinn doesn’t seem to need him or anyone but her Gotham City paramour, the Joker – in real life, my Parsons University grad student boyfriend.
As a creative professional with her first-ever grant, my bills in ‘Bama are paid, and I’m here visiting the Joker for a few weeks simply because I can. It’s not my first time in the Big Apple — I’ve been the handful of times necessary to know cool people don’t call it that — but, at 27, it’s my first time in years and my first time ever staying in Spanish Harlem, a magical land where the shopkeepers on our block huff or lightly click their teeth when I don’t speak Spanish. I don’t and I walk around feeling a combination of enchanted and inadequate.
Which is pretty much how I feel right now, though it’s clear the Joker doesn’t in this drizzle. Having lived here more than five minutes, he doesn’t seem inspired by the three subways we had to take to get to Brooklyn, and as I inhale the Manhattan skyline from the M on the Brooklyn Bridge, he watches me instead.
BUT HAVE YOU SEEN NEW YORK?
It’s so frickin’ cool.
I mean, I’m from ‘Bama. I’m from the red dirt that grew my Granddaddy’s blue collar all the way from steel-mill worker to Century Plaza mall security guard, and while my parents raised me with slightly better circumstances in middle-class suburbs, I sure ain’t from ‘round here.
Brooklyn, especially, is hipster-central to me, a place synonymous with Jake Gyllenhaal, local (vegan or bacon-proud) foodies, art I don’t understand, and, of course, indie music. I feel cooler just for being here and cooler still for striking up a conversation with a stranger — “Chris,” he introduces himself as. Yes! I know this name!
When I ask what he’s come as, eyeing his ruffled, off-white shirt, fancy coat jacket and — was it a fedora? — he says, and I quote, “A guy in a tux and a hat.”
I’m not sure whether it’s a costume.
We discover we’re both musicians – he plays upright bass in a Brooklyn-based rock band called Mistress – and he asks whence I’m based.
“Birmingham, AL,” I say, and I give the eye raise and shrug that says I’m aware that it’s Alabama, but it isn’t the same apology that five years ago I’d’ve bent over backwards to make.
“Birmingham?” he says, and his hat nearly lifts off — that’s how high his eyebrows raise.
He laughs.
Out loud.
At me.
I’m not joking.
“Yes,” I say. “I know, I know, not the best reputation, but it’s trying, especially the last few years” — my tone is diplomatic, unflappably friendly — “especially the music scene,” I say, thinking of new music venues like Iron City and the Forge and the microbreweries that often pop up somewhere nearby. I think of my friend Madison, in Birmingham specifically to gain experience booking bands. “Y’all should come,” I say, emphasis on the y’all.
Y’all — that’s a big deal for a little ol’ Southern belle who grew up hating everything about that sentence. For most of my life, in fact, I eschewed everything about the South, and my eyebrows raised the highest. From its sweet tea and front porches to its racism and seeming hatred of anything related to change or progress, I hated it all, especially how, to claim Alabama as home seemed equally to claim ignorance. I outright refused to say “y’all,” even when during my first year at G.W.U. in Washington, D.C., a friend pointed out the beauty of its gender neutrality compared to my “you guys.” ‘Cause “y’all” came from the same place as being 49th in everything, as did thanking a deity for the one state that allows us to, at the very least, not finish last.
I don’t know about Mississippi, but it turns out we’re not 49th, not according to most state report cards. In education Alabama ranks anywhere from 30-48th according to my Googlings, with a 2013 EPE Research Center study, whatever that is, giving us the 44th slot in K-12 achievement. Them’s the same public schools that grew me up.
So I ran like heck.
At 17 I fled to study abroad in Italy, vowing never to return, and in the few years that followed, I saw enough of the world that I learned I will never really see much of it at all. So imagine my surprise that at 23, three years after returning home broken-hearted from a failed forever at age 20, that I would have gotten to know my family better and simultaneously begun to appreciate some of my Southern-ness. I like magnolias and lazy back roads and the genuine friendliness behind my y’all. I like how much we love our barbecue, the Southern pride that burns fiercely red (or orange-and-blue) behind the rednecks and white collars alike. To be real honest with y’all, some days nothin’ in the whole-wide-world beats my feet kicked up on a cooler in the back of my friend’s F-150, us crooning along to country radio while a trashcan full of empty beer cans ignores us nearby.
But even as I began to appreciate parts of my Southernness, I still loathed Alabama, Birmingham in particular. Southern culture was kind of cool. But Birmingham, from where I was watching in an over-the-mountain suburb, still sucked.
So imagine my continued surprise — nay, my horror — when two years later at 25, I began freelance reporting for no reason other than money about stuff going on around Birmingham and learned that there is stuff going on around Birmingham. It’s not the irreplaceable New York. But I’d lived there almost my whole life and didn’t know that. There are cool people here. Cool things to do.
In 2013 alone Birmingham was named one of Fodor’s “14 Best Places To Go This Fall,” one of Forbes’ 15 “Up and Coming Downtowns”, and one of Zagat’s seven “Up-and-Coming Food Cities.” I mean, I see more local, independent restaurants and breweries popping up downtown than strip malls in suburbia. Despite an unbecoming history, Birmingham is becoming.
And we know that.
To the Brooklyn hipster, I say, “I’ll show y’all around, maybe surprise you.” I shrug. “Maybe you’ll still hate it, I dunno,” I add, and I finish with a concession: “It’s not all bad.”
(Author’s Note: It probably came out less elegantly.)
He laughs again. “Well I have this band mate,” he says. “Well thing is, well, um, she jokes, well, she jokes that they’d never allow her in Birmingham.”
He waits a beat.
“She’s black AND gay.”
Beat.
Beat.
Beat.
I’m staring at him.
Is it the Southern in me that wants to take my Gramba’s cast-iron skillet with the years of unwashed bacon grease and love in it and smack him upside his close-minded head? I want to explain to him how people are people everywhere. How ignorance of any kind — be it the facts of evolution or the burdens of a city best known for bombings — looks the same: his stupid, blinking face.
I mumble something about how he could talk to my ex-girlfriend, a Tarrant native and former Birmingham Civil Rights Institute staff member currently serving a fellowship at the Smithsonian, but I’m not sure he heard, and I’m certain it was less elegantly phrased than my first spiel. We split a few awkward moments later.
And then I have that horrible, horrible moment in which I realize I’m just like the thing I’m hating: I, too, hadn’t known the not-terrible things about Alabama even though I’m from the place.
Bless my heart.
And looking around the Halloween party that second, Brooklyn didn’t look very different at all: The living room was way narrower than any in Alabama but otherwise thumping with the same mix of Katy Perry, low-lighting, smoke, booze and those same, blinking faces that fear difference without recognizing its sameness, just like the rednecks I love back home.
Because it’s not that we’re all the same. Cultures – food, music, beliefs – often vary by geographic region.
It’s just that we’re all the same: food, music, beliefs.
Maybe too, I’d add fun and making fun of others’ fun, and the big two: family and friends, two of mine now sitting before me in a Spanish Harlem living room playing video games as I type. Their controllers and my laptop keys click away, and it could be my friend Alan’s place in Riverchase, a subdivision in Hoover, a suburb in Birmingham, a city in, yes, Alabama. Like any other place I’ve ever been, it has its cons and it has its pros, one of my new favorites being that I’ll call it home and invite y’all to visit.